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Welcome to Athanor!

· 4 min read
Luigi Acerbi
Luigi Acerbi
Lead Developer, Athanor - AI Workbench

I am excited to finally share the alpha release of Athanor - AI Workbench together with this new website.

What is Athanor?​

Athanor is a desktop app that sits between you and your AI assistant (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc.). Think of it as a workbench with a set of tools and knobs to make AI workflow actually practical. Athanor helps you:

  • Intelligently select relevant files for your AI prompts
  • Generate comprehensive prompts with proper context
  • Safely apply AI-generated changes with full visibility and control
  • Work with any AI assistant - no API keys required for core functionality

Athanor is an open-source project and you can find it on GitHub.

Why Athanor?​

Athanor was born out of my frustration with using standard chat interfaces for AI-assisted development for code and technical writing:

  • Gathering files manually was a pain, even using tools such as repomix
  • Most of my workflow consisted of fairly standardized operations (planning features, requesting changes, summarizing files) that I found myself retyping constantly.
  • Integrating the AI output back into a project–whether a codebase, a website, or technical writing–is painful:
    • When the AI outputs just a snippet, you need to manually copy-paste it at exactly the right place
    • When the AI outputs the entire file, it sometimes messes up or forgets something else along the way–and some files are just too large, so waiting for the full output is unwieldy

Also, having already multiple AI subscriptions, I wasn't too keen on switching to a pure API workflow or token-hungry AI coding agents (not yet at least).

That's how Athanor began. And now, after months of using it to build itself, I'm ready to share it with you.

What's on This Website​

I have put together documentation that covers what I thought would be useful for a newcomer. Yes, of course I have used Athanor and various AI assistants to help me with this (but this is me writing, working from an excessively salesman-y draft of this post).

Most importantly, the Tutorial takes you from installation to your first real workflow. It goes from basic prompts to customizing your Athanor experience to your specific needs.

Where We're At​

Athanor is in alpha. What does that mean practically?

  • It works. I have been using it daily for months (including to build Athanor itself from v0.1.0)
  • There are rough edges. Sometimes you'll hit a weird bug
  • Features are still evolving based on what actually helps vs. what seemed like a good idea
  • Many features are still in the wishlist

Your feedback at this stage is gold. If something is annoying or broken, please let me know.

Try It Out​

Right now, Athanor runs in developer mode:

npx setup-athanor
cd athanor
npm start

What's Coming​

In the next few weeks, I will be focusing on basic improvements:

  • Making it more stable
  • Increasing test coverage (yes, I know)
  • Performance improvements for larger projects (this will require making the Smart Preview actually smart)
  • More prompt templates based on actual use cases
  • Eventually, packaged releases so you do not need to run from source

The roadmap will also depend on what you tell me.

One More Thing​

At the moment, one thing Athanor is pretty good at is building Athanor.

The Athanor codebase, after an initial old-school "copy-paste" period, has been almost entirely written with Athanor. The almost is there just for academic precision–more than 99% of the code was written and integrated using Athanor. I have made a few manual changes here and here, when it was faster for me to fix a typo by hand than going through a prompt.

With this, I have experienced first-hand how development has become smoother and smoother. Having smarter models helped too, or course.

Anyhow, I think you might find Athanor useful too. Give it a try, and let me know how it goes. You can contact me on a variety of social media or directly on Athanor's GitHub issues or discussions.

Luigi Acerbi, building Athanor one prompt at a time